I was wondering where to report a problem. I previously posted about a Via C7 motherboard with a VT8237S southbridge not recognizing an SATA DVDrw on channel 2. Apparently the the chip supports one ide channel and two sata channels but the OpenBSD driver only supports one ide channel and 1 sata channel. The pciide and atapiscsi man pages do not say anything about this and those who rely on the man pages are going to disappointed. SATA burners are no more expensive than ide burner (although no faster) and make for a neater installation.

I suspect the developers who wrote the drivers had a good reason to not support the 2nd SATA channel. In the mini-ITX arena the major vendor is Intel which on my Atom 330 mobo works like a charm. Unless one plans to use a Via board with old ide hardware, they are really not well supported by OpenBSD and I believe the documentation should say so. Is "www@openbsd.org" the right place to report an issue with the documentation.

Yes, I know some simply post their woes on misc@, & wait for the developers to respond.

But given that the official release date for OpenBSD 4.9 is slightly less than two months now, creating the 4.9-release branch in CVS is likely to occur within the next week or so (Time has to be allowed to get the official CD sets reproduced & sent to the vendors...). Thus, getting this matter addressed is not likely to occur before tagging. Since your goal is to have someone look into this, I would suggest formally submitting a bug report via:

I think this falls somewhere between 2 and 4 in priorities and it look like it had already been submitted 2 years ago. I'll go ahead and resubmit it as a bug and if they can fix it would be great but if it is blown off as buggy hardware I feel it should be mentioned in the documentation.

I'm continuing to look at this issue sporadically and will restate the problem. It appears that that a number of Via southbridge chipsets (VT8237, VT8237A, VT8237S) only support one SATA drive in OpenBSD - they are supported in NetBSD, FreeBSD and Linux. The error reports indicate the problem mostly on the bsd.rd kernel with two sata hard drives and in my case and sata hd along with an sata dvdrw drive. I have tried booting the straight /bsd kernel and in my case the boot hangs very early with the line

Quote:

apati_scsi_intr: warning reading only 0 of 18 bytes

It is a very difficult bug to report as the hang occurs early enough that sendbug, or mounting a usb thumb drive are not possible. One of the reports I found did have the dmesg from a serial cable to another machine but the bug report was just ignored with no responses. (Actually none of the reports on this issue had a response and the one good report that went to the trouble to get a dmesg was also ignored from any developer)

It appears that the bug occurred between 4.4 -> 4.5. One odd thing I noticed was that the GnoBSD i386 CD in livemode does not hang and does recognize the drive while jiggami's fluxbox CD hangs. The FAQ says the softraid mode of the chipsets is not supported but none of the bug reports were using raid, they just wanted a second sata drive.

The ethos is to trust the man pages and the FAQ prior to anything else but both of these essentially state the chipset is supported except in RAID mode. My bug report appears to languishing along with the others.http://old.nabble.com/Second-SATA-ch...d31094000.html

Not sure how much more effort to put into this - people buying these mobo's thinking they will get a supported chip are going to be unhappy.